The Republican VP candidate’s airborne exchange with reporters yesterday was a trip down memory lane, a brief glimpse back at the Sarah Palin we grew to love a few weeks ago. Like the rich deposits of oil that lie just off the continental shelf, any actual ideas that Palin might have possessed were sealed away beneath miles of slop and rock. To the degree that she had a rhetorical strategy, it apparently consisted of uttering the name “Ayers” a few times, using several variants of the words “truthful” and “energize” as often and as randomly as possible, and introducing the phrase “goat rope” to the national political lexicon.

Toward the end of the conversation, though, Palin briefly alluded to the investigation into her firing of Walt Monegan, an investigation that she described as “Tasergate.” The term has its origins in the right-wing blogosphere, where a commenter named “Teflon Dad” apparently recommended the label in early September. From Teflon Dad, the term ascended the right-wing food chain, from Glenn Reynolds to Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, where the Hall of Fame Bush Fluffer Carl Cameron apparently mentioned it on-air.

Since the legislative inquiry pertains to Palin’s alleged abuse of power and not to the actions of State Trooper Mike Wooten — who did in fact Taser his own stepson – the phrase makes little sense. To draw a crude analogy, it would be like claiming that the Nixon administration was toppled by “Papergate,” since the White House Plumbers who broke into the Watergate Hotel were initially created in response to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The duplicitous phrase “Tasergate,” however, is unintentionally revealing; Palin has consistently argued that the dismissal of Monegan was completely unrelated to his refusal to fire Wooten. Indeed, in her explanation yesterday, Palin argued that she removed the commissioner “because his strengths were in other areas. It wasn’t in running an entire department. There was some, some duties there that he was not able to fulfill.” By referring to the affair as “Tasergate,” Palin unwittingly reinforces the central question in the legislative investigation, which is her alleged willingness to use public office to revisit what had originated as an intra-family conflict.

David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.